Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

“It's LA CONFIDENTIAL meets the Bio channel with a little TMZ thrown in for fun.” —ELLE

In the early-morning hours of August 5, 1962, Los Angeles County deputy
coroner Ben Fitzgerald arrives at the home of the world's most famous
movie star, now lying dead in her bedroom, naked and still clutching a
telephone. There he discovers The Book of Secrets - Marilyn
Monroe's diary - revealing a doomed love affair with a man she refers to
only as "The General." In the following days, Ben unravels a
wide-ranging cover-up and some heartbreaking truths about the fragile,
luminous woman behind the celebrity. Soon the sinister and surreal
accounts in The Book of Secrets bleed into Ben's own life, and he finds himself, like Monroe, trapped in a deepening paranoid conspiracy. The Empty Glass is an unforgettable combination of the riveting facts and legendary
theories that have dogged Monroe, the Kennedy's, the Mafia, and even the
CIA for decades. It is an exciting debut from a remarkable new
thriller writer.

From the website emptyglassnovel.com:

Conspiracy

A missing water glass, missing phone records, and missing tissue samples:
13 reasons to believe Marilyn’s death involved a conspiracy

Marilyn Monroe couldn’t have swallowed all the pills

According to the Marilyn Monroe toxicology
report, the actress had 4.5 percent milligrams of barbiturates and 8
percent chloral hydrate in her bloodstream, which means she would have
had to swallow around 30 to 40 phenobarbital, or Nembutals. And this
doesn’t account for the 13 percent phenobarbital the toxicologist, Ralph
Abernethy, found in the liver. That added percent means that Monroe
would have had to ingest 50, if not 80, pills by mouth. She would also
have had to swallow them quickly, since (if given time) the body rejects
the poison, vomiting it up—and yet there was no water in the house…and
no water glass on the table initially. In the entire history of
forensics, no one has ever died with such high blood concentrations of
phenobarb and chloral hydrate as a result of oral ingestion.

There was no light under Marilyn Monroe’s door

Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray,
claimed she’d noticed a light under the actress’s door when she went to
bed around ten on the night of the actress’s death. Murray went to bed
in her own room, adjacent to Monroe’s; they shared a wall. She woke at
midnight and had to go to the bathroom, she said, so she went into the
hall. She noticed that the light was still on under the door, and she
became alarmed. She tried the door, but it was locked from the inside.
She knocked: no answer.

But why would she have gone into the hall to use the bathroom when
one was accessible through her room? And the carpet pile in Monroe’s
room was so thick and high that it made closing the door difficult. This
meant that no light could possibly have escaped underneath. So how did
Murray know that Monroe’s light was still on?

No water glass was found in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom

No water glass was found in the first inspection
of Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom—in fact, the water in her hacienda had been
turned off because of renovations. And yet the actress allegedly died by
swallowing 50-80 pills. The lack of the glass was noted by Jack
Clemmons, the first responding officer, but later pictures clearly
showed a water glass on the actress’s bedside table. How did that glass
get there?

The death timeframe was changed

Initially, Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray,
claimed she became alarmed when she noticed a light under Monroe’s door
around midnight. Despite the fact that Monroe was a chronic
insomniac—midnight was hardly late for her—Murray claims she panicked,
and called…not the police but rather Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

When Greenson arrived at the hacienda, he, too, found Monroe’s
bedroom door locked. He went outside, looked through the bedroom window,
and saw the actress lying nude on the bed under rumpled bedclothes. She
looked “peculiar,” he said. He broke the window with a poker from the
living-room fireplace and climbed inside. She was clutching the phone.
“She must have been calling for help,” said Greenson, who later called
the actress’s physician,Dr. Hyman Engelberg.

But why would Monroe have been calling for help when she knew the
housekeeper was right next door? Even stranger, Murray, Greenson, and
Engelberg didn’t call the cops until 4:35 a.m. When asked why, they said
they had to get permission from the publicity department at 20th
Century Fox, where Monroe was making her last film, Something’s Got to Give.

The whole scenario was upended the following morning, when the L.A. Times reported that all the players had mysteriously changed their stories—specifically the time:

"Mrs. Monroe’s body was discovered after her housekeeper and companion, Mrs. Eunice Murray, awoke about 3 a.m. and saw a light still burning in the actress’ room.

But the bedroom door was locked. She was unable to arouse [sic] Miss Monroe by shouts and rapping on the door, and immediately telephoned Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

Dr. Greenson took a poker from the fireplace, smashed in a window, and climbed into the Monroe bedroom. He took the telephone from her hand and told Mrs. Murray, "She appears to be dead."

He called Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who had prescribed the sleeping pills, and pronounced her dead on his arrival at the house a short time later.

Dr. Engelberg called police at 4:20 a.m. and two officers arrived in five minutes."

A junior coroner, Thomas Noguchi, was asked to perform the autopsy

From Thomas Noguchi’s memoir, Coroner: “On [the morning of Monroe’s death] I discovered something strange. [Chief Coroner] Dr. Curphey
had telephoned the office early to leave me a message. The note on my
desk read, ‘Dr. Curphey wants Dr. Noguchi to do the autopsy on Marilyn
Monroe.’ A more senior medical examiner would normally have performed
the autopsy. And yet Dr Curphey had made a unique call on a Sunday
morning assigning me to the job.”

Marilyn Monroe’s body showed dual lividity

In his autopsy report, coroner Thomas Noguchi
noted “dual lividity” on the body of Marilyn Monroe. What does this
mean? Livor mortis happens during the first eight hours after death.
When the heart stops pumping, red blood cells settle in the lower
portion of the body, so that if the body is on its left side, the
lividity—a purplish spotting—appears at the bottom of that side. If
livor mortis is present on both sides, it’s called “dual lividity.” In
Monroe’s case, livor mortis was found on both the back and front of the
arms and legs. Which could indicate that the body had been moved.
Why would the body have been moved?

No refractile crystals were found in Marilyn Monroe’s stomach

If you ingest more than 12 capsules of
barbiturates, refractile crystals will appear in the digestive tract or
in the stomach. In his autopsy report, coroner Thomas Noguchi noted: “A
smear made from the gastric contents examined under the polarized
microscope shows no refractile crystals.”

No odor of pear emerged from Marilyn Monroe’s body

The smell of pear is characteristic of a chloral
hydrate overdose (which is part of what caused Marilyn Monroe’s death)
when chloral hydrate is taken by mouth. But the smell wasn’t apparent
during the autopsy—another reason to believe that Monroe did not swallow the pills. How, then, were the drugs introduced to her body?

No yellow color appeared in Marilyn Monroe’s duodenum

In Marilyn Monroe’s duodenum, the first digestive
tract after the stomach, there was “no evidence,” coroner Thomas
Noguchi wrote in his report, “of pills. No residue. No coloration.” But
Nembutals are called “yellow jackets” because of their distinctive
yellow color; it’s virtually inconceivable that she would or could have
swallowed 50 to 80 “yellow jackets” without leaving a tell-tale stain in
the duodenum.

Important specimen analyses were never done—and the specimens themselves vanished

Ralph Abernethy, the chief toxicologist,
delivered analyses on Marilyn Monroe’s blood and liver, but in his
autopsy report coroner Thomas Noguchi had requested analyses on the
kidney, stomach, urine, and intestines as well—because the analyses of
all these organs would show exactly how barbiturates had entered the
system. Without specimen analysis, there’s no way of telling how the
pills were ingested.
But Abernethy did not deliver analyses on the kidney, stomach, urine
or intestines because, he said, it was “obviously a suicide.” (That was
clearly not his call to make.) Strangest of all, the tissue samples that
were sent to be analyzed “disappeared” from Abernethy’s lab at UCLA.
“In the entire history of the L.A. county coroner’s office,” then-DA
John Miner said, “there has never been a[n] instance of organ samples
vanishing.”

Everyone at the death scene seemed to disappear on “vacation”

Most of the people who were at Marilyn Monroe’s
Brentwood hacienda late at night on August 4 and/or in the early morning
hours of August 5—her housekeeper, Eunice Murray; her publicist, Pat Newcomb; her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson; and her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg—mysteriously took “vacations” in the wake of the death.

Marilyn Monroe’s phone records went missing

“The morning after [Marilyn Monroe’s] death,” reporter Joe Hyams is quoted in Anthony Summers’s Goddess,
“I contacted a telephone company employee and asked him to copy for me
the list of numbers on her tape—a service he was willing to provide for a
fee. Within the hour my contact called me back from a pay phone. ‘All
hell has broken loose down here,’ he told me. ‘Apparently you’re not the
only one interested in Marilyn’s calls. The tape’s disappeared.’ I’m
told it was impounded by the Secret Service—I’ve never before heard of
the government getting in on the act. Obviously somebody high up ordered
it.”
Monroe’s phone records from June and July, which had already been
processed and therefore couldn’t be removed from the records, showed a
number of calls made to RE7-8200, the number of the Justice Department
in Washington, DC.

There were mysterious flights in and out of Los Angeles

Many people have claimed that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy
couldn’t possibly have been in Los Angeles on August 4 and August 5,
the night and/or early morning of Marilyn Monroe’s death. In fact, he
had been scheduled to speak at the American Bar Association Conference
on Monday, August 6, so he spent the weekend with his wife, Ethel, and
kids at the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, 300 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
On Saturday, Monroe’s last day, everyone went horseback riding.
On Sunday, Bobby attended mass at 9:30 a.m. in Gilroy. “He was
without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those that
welcomed him,” one paper said. “Perhaps the cares of the administration
are weighing heavily on him.”

Perhaps. But pages from flight logs at Conners helicopter at Clover
Field in Santa Monica showed the record of two helicopter flights on the
afternoon before and night of Monroe’s death. The first, from San
Francisco, had landed at 1:16 p.m. on August 4 at Stage 18 of the 20th
Century Fox lot near the Beverly Hilton. The second had flown out of
Santa Monica just after midnight on August 5, heading to San Francisco.

So what does this mean?

It means that Bobby could have left Gilroy on Saturday, flying from
San Francisco to the Fox lot after lunch and then heading to see Monroe.
It means he could have returned to Gilroy in time for prayers on
Sunday. But Monroe was found dead after midnight. Why did the second
flight leave L.A. for San Francisco almost 12 hours after the first
flight arrived? Maybe Bobby didn’t get what he wanted from Monroe in the
afternoon. So maybe he returned to her house that night—perhaps with Dr. Ralph Greenson, perhaps with Peter Lawford.

In a 1985 BBC interview, Monroe housekeeper Eunice Murray
finally dropped the defenses that she, like Lawford, had maintained
throughout her life and said, “Why, at my age, do I still have to cover
this thing?” She went on to say that Bobby had been in the Brentwood
hacienda on the day Monroe died and that a doctor and an ambulance had
come while Monroe was still alive.